Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 06/07 - Walmart Wants To Deliver to Your... Fridge...

Episode Date: June 7, 2019

Now you can’t get Facebook on new Huawei phones, Barnes and Noble waives the white flag, WarnerMedia abandons that tiered streaming plan idea, Walmart wants to deliver directly to your refrigerator and the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Tiny.website Pantheon.io/ride Vistaprint.com/RIDE Links: Exclusive: Facebook suspends app pre-installs on Huawei phones (Reuters) Elliott Management to acquire Barnes & Noble for $683 million (CNBC) Amazon’s Home Surveillance Company Is Putting Suspected Petty Thieves in its Advertisements (Motherboard) AT&T Eyes $16- to $17-a-Month Streaming Service in Strategy Shift (WSJ) Walmart employees will soon deliver groceries directly into your fridge (The Verge) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: New Evidence Suggests Satoshi Nakamoto Is Paul Solotshi, The Creator Of Encryption Software E4M And TrueCrypt (InvestInBlockchain.com) The Stanford connections behind Latin America's multibillion-dollar startup renaissance (TechCrunch) When Grown-Ups Get Caught in Teens’ AirDrop Crossfire (The Atlantic) Buildings Can Be Designed to Withstand Earthquakes. Why Doesn’t the U.S. Build More of Them? (NYTimes) The Big Challenge for Policy Makers: Policing American Tech Giants (WSJ) Not Your Daddy’s Regulation: Tech Giants Face A Complicated Reckoning In Washington (BuzzFeed.news) The Day When Computers Can Break All Encryption Is Coming (WSJ) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride Home for Friday, June 7th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Now you can't get Facebook on new Huawei phones.

Barnes & Noble waves the white flag. Warner Media abandons that tier streaming plan idea. Walmart wants to deliver directly to your refrigerator and the weekend Longreads suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So the whole Huawei mess just. keeps rolling on and on. Facebook is apparently no longer allowing pre-instillation of its Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram apps on new Huawei phones. Quoting from Reuters, customers who already have Huawei phones will still be able to use its apps and receive updates, Facebook told Reuters,

but new Huawei phones will no longer be able to have Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram apps pre-installed. Smartphone vendors often enter business deals to pre-install popular apps such as Facebook. Apps including Twitter and booking.com also come pre-installed on Huawei phones in many markets. Twitter declined to comment and booking did not respond to a request. The move by Facebook dampens the sales outlook for Huawei, whose smartphone business became its biggest revenue generator last year powered by strong growth in Europe and Asia, end quote. And on top of that, Sources are saying that Google is pushing the Trump administration to exempt it from a ban on exports to Huawei, warning that it could compromise national security.

You'll recall that the first bombshell from weeks ago was the news that Huawei phones would lose access to supported versions of Android. In a little bit of pretzel logic, Google seems to be arguing that forking Android, which Huawei might have to do, into some sort of Frankenstein hybrid version would make phones across the globe more at risk to being hacked by China, not less, quoting from the verge. Step one, Huawei Forks Android, creating a version that no longer includes Google Services.

One of the most important features of those services is Google Play, Protect software that automatically scans for malware, viruses, and security threats. Another is that people who buy phones with Google services generally stick to apps available in the Google Play Store, which are more rigorously checked for security than what you'll find on other stores. Step two, those Huawei phones with a forked version of Android are sold globally. They are less secure and get hacked. Step three, somebody in the U.S.

unknowingly sends sensitive information to somebody who is using one of those hacked Huawei phones. No matter how secure end-to-end encryption is, if there's malware directly on a phone, there's a risk it could see information sent to it. And many people don't check to see what phones they're sending information to. Step four, U.S. National Security is compromised, end quote. Not making a judgment on this either way, but something about all of those steps made me think of underpants gnomes. Shareholder activist investment firm Elliott Management announced today it will acquire Barnes & Noble for around $683 million, including debt. Quoting CNBC, the deal values Barnes and Noble at $6.50 a share, a 43% premium to the retailer's 10-day volume-weighted

average closing share price before news of an imminent deal leaked on Thursday. After the announcement, the stock was up 10% to $6.56 per share in pre-market trading. Barnes & Noble has faced continued pressure from Amazon and independent booksellers. Its shares had fallen roughly 25% year-to-date before the news leak. Within the past five years, Barnes & Noble has lost more than $1 billion in market. value. Amazon holds nearly half of new book sales, a report by audience research codex group said last year, while Walmart has about 4.2% of the market, end quote. And that's why I'm doing a segment on this, even though there's not an obvious tech angle here. In the annals of disruption with a capital D,

and disruption in the classical Silicon Valley sense of the word, the saga of Amazon versus Barnes & Noble is the oldest most storied example of the digital, disrupting the physical incumbent. Getting Amazoned was a term in the late 90s because of the Barnes and Noble example. Borders got slain early on, but that was largely due to mismanagement. Barnes & Noble has had actually a more successful rearguard action against Amazon than you would have thought. When I was researching the book, it surprised me to learn that Amazon didn't, actually pass Barnes & Noble in total book sales until something like 2007 or maybe even later than that.

And remember, it wasn't that long ago that Barnes & Noble was the big oligarch that people, at least in the book industry, feared, was killing traditional incumbents. Go rewatch, you've got mail, not only for the 90s nostalgia, but also for the reason that, you know, Tom Hanks is supposed to be Barnes and Noble in that movie, the big bad. Anyway, this is a momentous event. Barnes and Noble is essentially throwing in the towel after a 25-year fight. They've not gone the way of Blockbuster video yet. A couple of follow-ups related to previous segments. Ring the smart doorbell from Amazon, which has an app that encourages people to be paranoid about crime in their neighborhood, and seems to be happy to work with local police departments to create essentially a suburban, surveillance regime is using a video captured by one of its doorbell cameras in at least some

recent Facebook ads. Quote, in the video, the woman's face is clearly visible and there is no obvious criminal activity taking place. The Facebook post shows her passing between two cars. She pulls the door handle of one of the cars, but it is locked. The video freezes on a still of the woman's face from two different angles. Quote, if you recognize this woman, please contact the Mountain View Police Department, please share with your neighbors, end quote. That's the text superimposed on the video. In a post alongside the video, Ring urges residents of Mountain View, California to contact the police department if they recognize her, end quote. So aside from the fact that, you know, in this country, presumption of innocence, et cetera, and that has to be an actor,

right? If that's a real woman and she's ever identified, could, she sue Amazon for defamation or something? But also let me quote Jason Kobler, quote, Amazon and Ring are creating a persistent surveillance state where neighbors don't trust each other and profile each other. They do not care about privacy and don't even pretend to, end quote. And the Wall Street Journal is reporting that WarnerMedia has solved that problem that I told you about a few days ago. They are apparently abandoning their plans for a three-tiered streaming service and will likely package HBO Cinemax and the Warner Brothers Back Catalog altogether into one delicious stew for around $16 to $17 a month, which is an interesting move for the reasons we discussed

earlier. You know, all of Disney for $7 a month. But here's another way to look at it, quoting the journal. The new streaming service, which will debut in beta form later this year, essentially includes all of WarnerMedia's entertainment offerings and will feature its own new original content. Yet it will cost barely more than the company's current standalone HBO now streaming service, which sells for $14.99 a month. Cinemax, meanwhile, can cost as much as $12.99 a month for cable customers, end quote. So then wouldn't the smart move here be to just brand this new service as HBO or HBO Plus or something, right? And one more real quick.

Walmart has announced that starting this fall in three U.S. cities, its in-home delivery service will deliver groceries directly to customers' refrigerators, even when customers are not home. The in-home service will use Walmart vehicles and its own. phone workers equipped with proprietary wearable cameras using undisclosed smart entry technology, Walmart employees will be able to enter homes to make deliveries while customers will be able to control access and watch the deliveries remotely, end quote. So, body cameras on the delivery folk, so they can come in and load up my refrigerator and presumably my pantry, quote, now we can serve customers not just in the last mile, but in the last 15 feet, said,

Walmart in a statement. Mm-hmm. Leaving it outside my door is not convenient enough. What's the next step? Putting the toilet paper rolls on the little roll thingies in my bathroom? Where's the service that manually shovels the food into my mouth? To echo what several people have said on Twitter, look, Walmart, I know you think you're out Amazoning Amazon here, but come on.

Time once again for the weekend long. suggestions. Let's start in crypto. One of the biggest mysteries in crypto, and frankly, one of the biggest mysteries in the whole world, full stop, is who is Satoshi Nakamoto, or who was the supposed creator of Bitcoin who never revealed his true identity and then disappeared completely in 2011, leaving, by the way, one million Bitcoins behind that he owned in a Bitcoin wallet. Who was he? Where did he go? Why did he go? Why did he leave what at the time of this writing would be around $8 billion worth of Bitcoin untouched? Because remember, in Bitcoin, people can see when you move your coins around. Those coins have remained in cold storage this entire time. Various theories about the identity of Satoshi pop up every now and then. But the most intriguing one I've seen in a while comes from investin blockchain.com, which leads with this, quote. Paul Solachi, which is spelled S-O-L-O-T-S-H-I, which looks a lot like Satoshi. Paul Salachi, Calder Leroux, a 46-year-old criminal mastermind, is the creator of encryption software E4M and TrueC.

The cryptography encryption software Satoshi Nakamoto likely used to lock up his 1 million BTC, and author of an uncannily similar manifesto to the one in Bitcoin's white paper in 1998. But that's not all. Paul Saloth Chi, Calder LaRoe, employs similar spelling and language in his writing style to that of Satoshi. He's interested in gambling. Bitcoin's initial code had a poker client included, and what's more, he's been in jail since 2012. That's probably the reason why his one million Bitcoin hasn't moved, end quote. Check that piece out if you like mysteries. After many years of false starts, there's been a lot of talk about how Latin America has finally become a hot market for tech startups. TechCrunch has a useful summary of why that may be

of the Latin American market in general and the specific connection to Stanford University. Quote, back in 2010 when Adiemi Ahau, Carlo da Puzzo, and Juan de Antonio were students at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, they could not predict that they would be counted among the vanguard of investors and entrepreneurs transforming Latin America's startup economy. The three men are now at the center of a vast web of startups whose intersection can in many cases be traced back to the house on Josina Avenue, where DePuzzo and De Antonio lived and where Aheyo spent most of his free time. It's the same dynamics as the PayPal Mafia says Aheyo. The new unicorn batches, which started in Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil, although they're all transnational, they all know each other.

And literally, they are all friends and all co-investors in each other's companies. And they all have links to Silicon Valley and more importantly to Stanford, end quote. You may have seen this piece making the rounds this week. Have you ever gotten a random AirDrop message on your iPhone when you're out in public? The great Taylor Lawrence looks at how teens are using AirDrop to get around things like school crackdowns on social media usage. In short, quote, once there's a critical mass of people around usually enough so that it's not immediately clear who an AirDrop came from, teens start dropping photos, memes, selfies, and more to every open. an iPhone around, end quote. Again, no one is better than Taylor at keeping an eye on the beat of

what the kids are up to today and why. And did you know that Japan has much better technology than the U.S. when it comes to building buildings that can survive earthquakes? The technology is called base isolation, but TLDR, the U.S. generally doesn't build using base isolators as much as Japan does because buildings here are only expected to have a 50-year lifespan anyway. So the thinking is, chances are your building won't see an earthquake in its natural lifetime, and if it does, hey, just tear it down and build a new one. Disposable culture for the fail. Turns out that there is one prominent building that has used base isolators recently,

Apple's new headquarters. You can even see pictures of the base isolators. isolators at work, two stories underground of the so-called Spaceship H.Q. at Apple. Quoting the piece, one of the designers of the building was Johnny Ive, the man who was responsible for the look and feel of Apple products such as the iPhone and iPad. A native of Britain, Mr. Ive said he found the threat of earthquakes utterly alarming when he moved to California in the 1990s and was surprised by the Californian nonchalance towards them. Mr. Ives said he and Mr. Jobs never considered using a

conventional foundation for the building. We would have seen it as utterly bizarre not to protect our investment, he said, end quote. And since this has been in the news so much over the past week, two different pieces, one from the Wall Street Journal and one from BuzzFeed looking at the philosophical underpinnings of the current antitrust movement that is targeting tech. As BuzzFeed says, this is not your daddy's regulatory regime because the old frameworks of consumer harm and price inflation don't apply to tech. In short, the big tech platforms obviously have dominance in their given market sectors, but they thrive at offering tons of choices and conveniences for consumers, often for free.

Read both pieces, but this is a good summation and it's from the journal piece, quote, one common argument is that consumers are facing myriad harms, even as they now enjoy free services that used to cost money, like searching for information, using maps, and getting directions, communicating with friends, and having goods shipped to their homes. Many economists say consumers do pay for all of these services, not with cash, but by providing the tech companies with valuable information about their personal lives, as well as shopping and search habits. Those companies, in turn, convert that data into big profits by selling it to advertisers and others.

These economists say that in a more competitive market, the real free market price could be lower than it is. Consumers, they suggest, might be paid for that data. quote, although accessing services for free may appear to be an attractive proposition, this zero price may in fact be too high as consumers could be extracting greater value in return for their data, said a March report commissioned by the British government, end quote. Sounds familiar, two things we've said on here. And finally today, a piece by friend of the pod, Chris Mims, also in the journal, about something that I've been reading quite a lot about recently. You know how national security experts increasingly fear that technology advances in things like AI are a zero-sum game? How the first country to any meaningful breakthroughs might have a leg up on others that could potentially block them from catching up?

Well, what if I told you the possibility exists that any day now, someone will have the technology that will make it possible to break encryption? the encryption that underpins everything we do in modern life from messaging to commerce to transactions. The danger comes from an ultra-powerful and still experimental technology called quantum computing, which leverages the quantum properties of atoms to quickly compute problems that no conventional computer could crack. China has already launched the equivalent of a Manhattan project in order to achieve this end, say experts, and companies like Google, Microsoft, and IBM are all pushing ahead with their own efforts to create quantum computers. quantum computers, which are still in the very early stage, could revolutionize any number of real-world tasks from researching new materials to picking the best route for delivery drivers. But right now, what many experts worry about is the problem of security. Quote, whoever gets to true quantum computing first will be able to negate all the encryption that we've ever done to date. Representative Wilhurd, Republican of Texas, has said, this is why China and Russia are hacking every system they can get into, including banking, health care, military and intelligence and downloading huge troves of data, added representative heard.

The information is currently indecipherable to them, but could become intelligible with quantum computers, end quote. Big if true would kind of explain a lot of recent headlines, wouldn't it? Enjoy your weekend, everybody. Only one weekend bonus episode this week, coming out tomorrow, and it's what you probably are expecting. A debriefing, a full debriefing of W. WDC, John Voorhees of Mac Stories, helps me not only recap what we saw this week, but take the temperature of actual devs attending WWDC and see how they're feeling about what's been announced, and also pick up some of the bits and pieces that we probably didn't even get to talk about this week.

See you all on Monday.